Why it sometimes makes sense to not make components re-usable

Description

Collection: Advanced Site Building in Drupal 7Chapter: Using Views to Create a Blog Home Page and Creating a Quick Sub-theme

One theme that keeps coming up in this video series is the idea of re-using components like view modes and custom formatters. In this video we look at the other side of the story, when building a reusable component really isn't all its cracked up to be.

Transcript

The next thing we need to do is create our blog homepage. If we jump to our wireframes and jump to our homepage for the blog, you can see it is composed of a couple of different components. At the very top, we have a slideshow and we're going to take care of that last.

As we scroll down, we have kind of a typical blog homepage. We have entries. And as part of these entries we have a title.

We have a body. We have an image that's floated off to the right, and then we have this three comments, add your comment now. So we're going to start by building this view out here.

Now just like before, one of our questions here is whether we should use a view mode and bundle this display of fields into a component that we can reuse in several contexts. Or if we should use fields in views and build this out as a one-time collection of fields. The way we decide whether we're going to do one or the other is if we think we're going to be able to reuse the configuration.

If so, then it might make sense to bundle this in a view mode. And at some point during your development as a site builder, you'll start to really feel the power of reusing configuration, and you'll want to bundle everything into reusable components like view modes and custom formatters. Once you get that out of your system, y ...

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Skill focus: Site BuildingSkill level: Intermediate - Advanced

Get ready for a dive into some of Drupal's most powerful tools for site builders. Here we look deep into Views, Panels, Display Suite, and Context modules for laying out Drupal pages. We uncover importing content into a Drupal site with the Feeds module, build and customize a slideshow with Views Slideshow and immerse ourselves in ways to spam-proof our site. Most importantly, we look at how all of these tools work together and how to decide which tools are best for which situation.

Before watching this series, you will need a fresh Drupal 7 installation. Follow the videos in the Setting Up a Web Environment With Drupal to get Drupal set up on your Windows, OSX (Mac) or Linux machine.

Some of the key points we'll be covering include:

How to set up administrative tools to speed up your building process.

How to configure content types and decide when to share fields and other configuration.

How to use the Panels modules to position content

How to use Display Suite for positioning content and building new view modes without code!

Working with advanced Views tools like relationships and argument-passing

How to build a slideshow with Views

How to import content into your site using the Feeds module

Who this collection is for

This collection is for anyone who wants to learn the most powerful tools and techniques for organizing and positioning content on a Drupal site. This will of course be useful for determining which techniques to use on your own projects, but because we will cover the most common techniques you will be likely to run into when working with existing Drupal projects, this collection will help you tremendously when working on a team.

Prerequisites

A basic familiarity with Drupal concepts and terminology will be useful. If you start to feel lost, you may want to review the "Build Your First Drupal 7 Web Site" collection where we cover these. This collection is intended as a kind of sequel to that collection, so we build off of the ideas from it.

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